Date: June 5, 2440 Time: 11:42 PM CST
L’tani didn’t notice the passage of time at first. She was still flushed, breathless, fingers unconsciously tracing the pattern of his ribs beneath her. Her body was buzzing—electric, unmoored—and for one rare instant, she believed in fate.
And then Matt didn’t move.
At first, she thought he’d simply fallen asleep. Spent, as he deserved to be. But something about the way his weight sagged—utterly limp—turned her blood cold.
Her pleasure shifted instantly to fear.
“Matt?” she whispered.
He didn’t respond.
“Matt!”
His body was limp, unresponsive. Panic overtook her. She fumbled for his communicator and screamed, “Angelina! Mother! Help!”
They came thundering up the stairs from opposite ends of the house.
“What happened?” Angelina snapped, shoving L’Tani aside to get to him.
“I think I killed him!” she sobbed, tripping over his jeans, not knowing where hers were.
Angelina ignored her. She grabbed Matt’s metabolic reader, one of the latest gadgets he was trying, shoved it into his mouth, and pinched his nose until it beeped. She checked the readout, then his phone.
“He’s not dead,” she growled to the small crowd that had gathered. She grabbed a robe and tossed it at L’Tani. “Everyone out. Back to bed!”
No one moved.
She opened the door again. “If anyone speaks of this before I say so, I will personally kill you. Move!”
The hallway cleared in seconds, because they honestly believed she might.
Angelina turned back to the girl. “Did you come straight here after the last time I saw you?”
“Yes,” L’Tani mumbled, ashamed.
“Look at me,” Angelina said, lifting her chin more forcefully than she meant to. “You did not kill him.”
Angelina had rarely been up here in the last ten years. She and Amy had spent a lot of hours drinking tea in the soft light of the stained glass projection windows when she had been too sick to even come downstairs. They had both been pregnant with twins that winter. She looked at the chaos, the changes Amy would never have allowed, like junk piled on tables and chairs, and then the broken chair and knocked-over lamp she would most strongly have approved of. He and L’tani had been going at it for at least two hours. Either the girl’s part, goddess or that pheromone of hers should be bottled and sold. She could picture Amy laughing her ass off about that notion and making sure she was able to try it out.
T’monn, looked on in shock. No one had ever manhandled her daughter that way before. She wanted to say something, but was too furious at L’Tani right now to know if she even disapproved.
Angelina didn’t waste time.
“Come with me,” she told both of them, leading them to the bathing suite. She turned on the water and shoved a bar of cedar oil soap into L’Tani’s hand. “Scrub. You smell like a barn cat in heat.”
“Will he be all right?” T’monn asked, exhaling.
“I think so,” Angelina said, checking the monitor again. “It showed a foreign substance in his bloodstream that it can’t identify,” she said, flicking the data to a previously opaque screen that just looked like part of the wall. “She’s almost certainly the source. What exactly are we dealing with here?”
T’monn hesitated, visibly uncomfortable. “It is a mating scent marker. L’Tani has just come into her ability to produce V’ren mating pheromones. She’s young, untrained, and likely overwhelmed,” She went back to looking at the data and was impressed with the little machine’s ability to analyze complex chemical compounds. “I am no biochemist, but I recognize these chemical structures. I had no idea humans could be affected so strongly… but clearly, I was mistaken.”
“Clearly,” Angelina’s eyes rolled before giving her head a little shake. Now was not the time to be pissy, she told herself, no matter what her PMS wanted. She would need to get Floyd involved; he might have been just a high school chemistry teacher for most of his career, but he did have a master’s in biochemistry. “T’mari smells different. More subtle. She told me she tried to use it on him, too.”
“She did,” T’monn admitted. “But he didn’t visibly respond.”
“You have a lot to learn about human men, especially this one.” Angelina sighed with complete exasperation and exhaustion. Like Matt, her day started early yesterday and was fueled by caffeine, a short nap, and enough stubbornness to make a Missouri mule jealous. “That’s what T’mari thought too. Said he was polite, restrained, almost aloof. But later—when he was alone with me—he admitted she nearly undid him. So did you the first night during that truck ride with him. If either of you had been paying attention, he could barely breathe when she brushed up against him, as she left. Every human woman in the room saw it fr what it was.”
T’monn’s brows furrowed. “He resisted?”
“He did. Until tonight. L’tani, for whatever reason, didn’t give him room to resist, assuming he even wanted to. She overwhelmed him.”
“I see,” T’monn said quietly. “I assumed—incorrectly—that humans wouldn’t register the signal. But if what you say is true, he wasn’t immune at all. Just… incredibly strong-willed.”
“He is,” Angelina replied. “But he’s not unbreakable. And tonight proved it.”
“She has reached so far outside her station; this is unforgivable,” T’monn said, thinking about the social implications.
“Bullshit! I don’t care about that; he won’t care about that, assuming he wakes up. Only you highborns are clinging to the illusion that your caste system can continue here on earth,” She raised a hand in the v’ren gesture to let her continue. “It is fine for however you rank yourselves in your headcannon, but it won’t fly among humans. The real problem is that he was waiting for T’Mari. He has real feelings for her.”
“If that’s true, it’s a tragedy,” T’monn said. “Our pheromones only affect compatible mates—those we can reproduce with. If he didn’t react to T’Mari, she is not his match. L’Tani is.”
“You didn’t listen to me, he responded to her in ways that I haven’t seen out of him in nearly 20 years. Can your people even have children with humans?” Lola Rhea had been right that there was broken furniture. She smirked as L’tani’s jeans were lazily circling above the bed on the ceiling fan. She would enjoy telling the old woman all about this later. Knowing he was alive and likely had a really good time, let her relax a bit.
“L’Tani’s research suggests yes. High probability, in fact,” She refrained from saying without a doubt in her mind or that of more than 21 other geneticists.
Angelina found the bottle she was looking for and shoved it into the shower. “Scrub until you don’t stink.” She looked back at T’monn. “What does this pheromone do to men? If we are going to help him, I need to know,” she said, digging through the cabinet and deciding whoever arranged this needed a serious ass chewing.
“Overwhelms them like an intoxicant with psychotropic effects in the extreme. It allows them to orgasm fully and completely with a release of sperm. I don’t know what psychological effects it might have on humans, but I suspect it still made him release.”
“Oh honey, human men don’t need any help with that last item,” she said, rolling her eyes because she had a 12-year-old son, and turned back to L’Tani, “Keep scrubbing and wash your hair with that,” she said, handing in the bottle of skunk shampoo.
“We need to get him away from her—for now,” T’monn said. “It will be awkward. But necessary. She has created a serious social situation with her lack of control, even if humans don’t care.”
Matt finally let out a soft snore, and a look of serene bliss overcame his face. She tried to be happy for him; it had been a long while since she had seen him look that way. Her cramps also wanted to wipe that look of smug smile off his face with an eskrima stick right across his teeth.
Angelina shook her head. “No she needs to stay with him at least for a while. How old are your girls when they develop this ability?”
“Usually between twelve and eighteen in Earth years. L’Tani is on the older end only about five percent go through it after they turn 18. She’s still learning control.”
“Humans call that puberty,” Angelina said, trying to understand this mess. She didn’t dislike L’tani, quite the opposite, in fact.
“I don’t know how Matt will take this,” Angelina said. “He’s been through so much. He doesn’t need more heartbreak.”
“You care for him deeply,” T’monn observed.
“My parents see him as the son they never had and always wanted. I once wished he’d see me as more than a sister. I even encouraged it for a while. I was too stupid and too young to know what sort of fire I was playing with. Then someone else came along and hurt him so cruelly that I still get angry after 30 years. He’s never really healed.”
T’monn looked at the sleeping man again. He had not simply been conquered by biology—he had fallen, exhausted, after years of holding back everything he wanted.
“You would honestly kill for him,” T’Monn said, remembering what she told the crowd earlier.
“I would, and he would forgive me for it. But he’d rather I didn’t do it in the first place. I served on more than one of his posses where he had to go out and personally kill a lawbreaker for unforgivable crimes. We talked about what it is like to take the life of another person; it hits him hard. I know it would hit me harder, but I would still do it if it were necessary to protect him.”
“What will you do now?” T’monn asked, knowing this was the woman in charge and that she had no authority here.
“When she’s clean, I’m putting her back in bed with him. If he wakes up alone, he’ll think he was used—or worse, that it meant nothing. He needs to see a familiar face.”
“Are you sure he’ll wake?” T’monn said, not knowing enough about human physiology yet.
“I am. This isn’t poison. Just… something new. He’s not broken. Just exhausted. Most human men don’t last more than ten minutes or so, even if they are really trying. They were at it for more than two hours and broke sturdy furniture. I am a little envious. My husband and I have never broken furniture.”
T’monn trailed the short woman down the hallway to the quarters L’tani had been given. “There will be social consequences.”
“There always are. We will deal with them. For now, we play this as mutual enjoyment. Would sleeping in his bed, this one,” she asked, pointing to his old bed, “have any effect on her emotional state or physiology?” Angelina said, gathering a nightshirt and clean underwear, but nothing too sexy, and wondered who ordered her some of this stuff. They had done right by her, at least. She knew real silk when she touched it. “That was his bed until he got married.”
“It smells of him and other women,” T’monn said, breathing deeply. “So possibly, yes. Can you not smell him?”
“I can smell the weed he used to smoke regularly and a little of his cologne, but not him and certainly not other women. Why do you, L’tani, and T’mari smell different? What makes their scent so distinct?”
“We have different fathers from different lines. Infants have a scent marker as well; it affects the father and helps with creating the parental bond. They have different fathers, but also different levels of physical maturity. T’mari has had ten of your years to learn self-control. L’tani, a few weeks at most. It will be several days before she can do this again. We should separate them for his own good. Our people will have much to say about her actions, and I do not want it to hurt him.”
“Not a chance,” Angelina said seeing the worry this woman held for Matt, over that of her own daughter, and it irritated her. If this girl had no more sense or self-control than a twelve-year-old, then someone needed to step in and protect her, too. Like many who came to her heartbroken over Matthew, she would help this one, too.
She let out a breath she didn’t know she had been holding and would do her best. Unlike Matt, she would admit to having a bit of a savior complex.
“What are we going to do about this?” T’monn asked, putting her hands behind herself to keep from wringing them histrionically.
“Right now, we are going to take care of them.”
